2020

 

Gray light spreads

Somber seasons gather

Rusted autumn leaves falling

over the shattered freeways

and an unrelenting rain starts

deluging memories, hopes,

sweeping it all away

 

Long ago, I recall a vision -

myriad dates engraved on walls of future

Among them, 2020 stood out most vividly

I stepped closer, peering …

 

The cryptic message’s vibration was certain

 

An important year for the world

 

It radiated convergence, electrical pulse,

a vortex churning with digital alluvions of power …

 

Pandemonium 

 

Over a decade later, it emerged on the horizon

A shadow, small at first in the distance

Rising slowly, faceless, hooded, a black-robed titan

Invisible, yet looming over cities and nations

Howls, insults, weeping, strangle the heavy air

People running, cowering … rage coagulates into confrontations

From the expanding void of this uncertain night

Medieval echoes of hammer on anvil grow louder

 

The wheel turns inexorably; rain falls in hard sheets

Across empty streets the neurotic wind whispers to itself

While an endless digital slipstream casts catatonic spells,

Screening off the legions of intubated, rasping for precious air

Like some mad sci-fi experiment of torture and deletion

 

An unstable world of children struggling to ward off shadows

Confused, taunted, and provoked by the phantasms of duality

In the rear-view we will remember this: the Age of Disinformation

Everyone’s padded, dizzying chamber of distorted news, videos, posts

A virtual reality of holograms, surging energies: a failed war of the mind

Blurring before overriding the foundational intentions of compassion

Drowned out with torrential generalizations, demonizations, conspiracies,

Exaggerated narratives �" and battling projections of condemnation and fear

All in the grips of the forgotten, far deeper, primordial separation,

wherein originates our true, vast, heartbreaking solitude

 

And yet in the silence of the abyss we are reborn

 

Intuitions are misted, but vestiges of faith stand

Don’t be troubled by this or the years to come

It is the first hill of colossal mountains we must cross

The honing of a blade that will pierce the world

Opening the pathway that leads beyond,

to the ever snow-crowned pinnacles